Cut-short your Vista Control Panel the way you want it !

Posted on Aug 14, 2008

Many of you folks who are using Windows Vista or I should say Windows must be well familiar with Control Panel. It’s a place where we can change settings for our hardware devices, windows and installed programs. Ya I know you all know this and obviously I’m not going to tell you this. What I’m going to tell you is that how you can tweak windows to display only those items that you want to see in Control Panel coz if you are not an advanced user you might not need all those items listed in the Classic View there for ex. Administrative Tools, Bit Locker Drive Encryption, Color Management, Default Programs, Indexing options etc. etc.

So in order to show only the items you need, just follow this simple tutorial. But first let me give you an idea of what we are going to do with the help of the screenshots given below:

( these are the default items in control panel showing in classic view)

(these are the items which I prefer to see in control panel.)

Here’s how you can do this>>>>

1. Click the Start button, type gpedit.msc in the search box and hit enter.

2. Click Continue if you have UAC enabled (by default UAC is enabled).

3. In the left pane of the Local Group Policy Editor, navigate to User Configuration>> Administrative

Templates>>Control Panel.

4. In the right pane of the window, double-click on Show only specified Control Panel items

5. In the dialog box that appears select Enabled

6. Now to add the list of items click on Show button given below in the same dialog box.

7. In the Show Contents dialog box, click on Add button.

8. Now type the name of the Control Panel item which you wish to show and click OK. You can add as many number of items as you want by choosing from the control panel.

9. Now you can close the Local Group Policy Editor.

NOTE: Suppose you want to show 90% of the items (means you want to hide only 4 or 5 items) in the control panel then you’ll have to repeat the step no. 8 quite a serious no. of times which is not handy.So here comes the tricky part. If you want to hide only 4 or 5 items in the CPL, double-click on Hide specified Control Panel items instead of Show specified Control Panel items in Step no. 4. and follow the rest of the tutorial as it is.

tweak Domain Logon Cache Entries in Vista

Posted on Aug 11,2008

If you are using Windows Vista(except Home Editions), when you try to connect to a domain, it caches the domain credentials locally so that you can use them to login in case the domain might not be available.

This is done by a setting known as CachedLogonsCount in Registry Editor. It shows the number of domain logon entries vista is currently saving in the logon cache on the local machine.

Here' is how you can do this>>>

1. Click on Start button, type regedit in the search box and hit Enter.

2. Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\winlogon

3. In the right pane of the window, look for cachedlogonscount.

4. Right-click on it and select Modify.

5. In the Value data field you can choose a value between 0 to 50 coz 50 is the maximum.

6. Click OK and exit Regedit.

7. Now Reboot your computer.

Disable regedit under windows vista ultimate

Posted on Aug 09,2008

Users running MS Windows Vista Ultimate on their machines can prevent any kind of fiddling with the Registry Editor by disabling it and for that I’m going to tell you a simple tutorial.

Here’s how you can do this>>>>

1. Click on Start button, type gpedit.msc in the search box and hit Enter.

2. Click Continue to elevate the UAC prompt. This will allow you to open Group Policy Object Editor.

3.In the left pane of the window navigate to User Configuration>> Administrative Templates>>System.

4.Now in the right pane, double click on Prevent access to registry editing tools and you’ll get the following window.

5.Here click on Enabled and select Yes in the drop down menu given below.

6.Click on Apply ,then OK and close the Group Policy Object Editor.

7.That’s it you are Done.

Now you can not access Regedit by any means. But if you do wanna fiddle with it you can select Not Configured option in step 5.

Come here! to know the changes made in Windows Vista SP1

Posted on July 26, 2008

Hi Guys, want to know what changes have been made in Vista SP1, check out these links:--

Microsoft Help and Support:

KB941946 Overview of Windows Vista desktop search Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1

and

Windows Vista TechCenter:

Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1